I stopped by Subway to pick up a sandwich around 2:30 p.m. yesterday and ordered a 6-inch Chicken Bacon Ranch. They added cheese, toasted it at my request, neatly arranged the plastic-wrapped chicken pieces on the bread, then asked if I wanted mayo on it. I said “no.”
The woman preparing the sandwich proceeds to grab the mayo container and squirt it all over the chicken pieces. Then, she reaches for the ranch dressing. It was at that point that I think she realized her error. So, to fix it, she takes a knife and starts scraping off the biggest dollops of mayo, the ones that haven’t already oozed their way in between the chicken chunks. She then adds the ranch dressing and vegetables and wraps the sandwich, as I stare through the plastic food guard.
I think maybe if the sandwich hadn’t already been toasted, they might have started the process all over again. But it was too late. The sandwich was already toasted; the American cheese and chicken already added. There was no turning back.
Others would have demanded another sandwich. But me, I paid my $9.00 for the meal, took the ranch-and-mayo covered sandwich and dealt with it.
Having worked as a waitress in food establishments in Hawaii, Massachusetts and New York City, I’ve seen a lot. There was the ostensibly nice gentleman who inquired, if my mother was ethnically Chinese and I was from Hawaii, how the heck was my English so good? There was the table of 12 from Europe who ran up a $300+ bill at a French restaurant I worked at in Brooklyn, spilled salad and chocolate ice cream all over the floor, and left $0 for a tip. And don’t even get me started on my experiences working as a manager at my college dining hall.
But the worst in my opinion are the picky eaters — the ones who quibble over the shades of pink between medium and medium rare, or who send back a sandwich with tomatoes instead of just removing the offending vegetables with a fork.
I always talk to one of my best friends, a veteran of Zippy’s, about how working in food service builds character. We’ve thought of writing a guide book for diners called something like “How Not to Be a Food Snob” — although, admittedly, that was one of the, um, TAMER titles we tossed out in discussions.
Tip #36: Always leave a cash tip. It’s easier for wait staff, and in many places eliminates them having to rely on the cashier to open the register to exchange credit card tips for cash. At the restaurant I worked at in Brooklyn, the manager, who was the only one who could tip out wait staff from the register, suddenly underwent an operation and didn’t return to work until after I had quit — cheating me out of about $100 in credit card tips.
Probably because of my experience working on the other side, as a customer I try to refrain from sending back food unless (a) it’s the wrong order, (b) it looks like it might make me deathly ill, or (c) it’s not quite dead … or has something not quite dead crawling in it.
I do get that sometimes you should be demanding about your food. Especially if you’re paying a lot at a fancy restaurant for a meal. But there are ways to request good food and good service without being mean about it. Remember Tip #45 — Food service is a stressful and often thankless job that doesn’t pay well, and there’s often more to the person who’s serving your hamburger than just their funny outfit or how skillfully they refill your drink.
And if you can’t remember Tip #11 (Be Nice), then you just gotta remember Tip #1 — Don’t Mess with the Person Who Handles Your Food.
I did a story and posted on this blog in April about Kevin Nguyen, 17, who is suffering from a rare genetic disease that claimed the lives of his two brothers.
Because of his illness, Kevin can’t live the life of a normal 17-year-old, and spends much of his time playing video games in his Kalihi home and dreaming about becoming a video game designer.
After the story ran, Aloha Island, a local video game developer, got in touch with Kevin’s family and arranged for him to visit their small studio on University Avenue, which he did last week.
(Above: Kevin poses with a character from a game, “Aloha Island,” that is still being developed.)
“He seemed equally interested in everything, and not just art or programming,” Aloha Island producer Ty Robinson, who took the photos, said in an email. “Usually kids gravitate quickly to something, but it seemed he had a very broad view of all the elements that go in a game, which I thought for his age was pretty amazing.”
Robinson also showed Kevin a tool he could use to make his own games, called “Scratch,” and how 3D characters are created in movies and games with a software package called MAYA.
“Although I just met him, I could tell right away he is a fighter, and really knows his stuff about games,” Robinson said. “He made a big impression on all of us, and we are truly grateful for the opportunity.”
(Above: Kevin with lead artist Jason Nobriga, who presented Kevin with an autographed concept sketch.)
Kevin graduated in a special ceremony from McKinley High School in April. The principal of McKinley, as well as Kevin’s elementary and middle school teachers, his family and many friends, attended.
You can probably tell from the lack of blog posts yesterday and the day before that I’ve come down with a case of uninspired-itis again. Here are some things that interested me today:
Preggers.
Disturbing: A pact between teenage girls at Gloucester High School to get pregnant was at least partly behind a rise in the number of pregnancies there, according to the AP.
The school’s principal told Time magazine that several girls confessed to making the pact. The school started to worry when 17 girls, none over 16, became pregnant. The school average is four pregnancies per year.
The principal told Time, according to the AP, that “[s]ome of the girls reacted to the news they were pregnant with high fives and plans for baby showers.”
I wish teenagers would stick to trends like black nail polish or Hello Kitty pencil cases — things that can be rubbed off or thrown away or outgrown … not like a baby.
The Guardian reports that a man whose skin cancer had spread to his lung and groin was cleared of all traces of the disease after doctors injected him with five billion of his own immune cells.
Cloning was used to create billions of the man’s own cells, which, when they were put back into his body, starting attacking the cancer. Tests showed that tumors in the patient’s body disappeared within two months of the treatment and had not reappeared two years later.
Doctors believe that the treatment could work in about a quarter of people with skin cancer whose immune systems are already primed to attack the cancer, the article said.
Hat tip to juh for the link.
Aloha, Azerbaijan!
Hawaii state House Rep. Gene Ward’s Thursday op-ed in the Advertiser about a recent women’s rights conference in Azerbaijan got a mention in APA, which covers news in that Eurasian country. Amusingly, the news service labeled Ward a “Congressman,” and included beside the article what I think is a photo of the U.S. House? Senate?
Congress, legislature, it’s all the same. Oh well.
Props to Ward for looking beyond Hawaii and offering his perspective on an important international issue.
What’s a Blog For?
There’s a 6-comment discussion going on over at Poinography regarding the Advertiser blogs, in response to Doug White’s recent post about Editor Mark Platte’s June 15 column about blogging. For the most part, the comments (all besides mine) are pretty critical of the approach to blogging the Advertiser has taken.
This underscores an interesting and current debate about the purpose of a blog. When I first got to blogging back in high school, blogs were online diaries where you’d post your thoughts, feelings, angry poetry, song lyrics and other gibberish. Flash forward 10 years later and blogs are transforming the media landscape with insider analysis or information posted minutes or seconds after news breaks.
A lot of the Advertiser blogs more closely resemble the online diary model than the Daily Dish (Andrew Sullivan), Instapundit, Boing Boing or Talking Points Memo models. Which is great, if you’re just looking to offer your two cents about cell phones, but annoying if you’re looking for something with more, well, substance, or insider info that all of us reporters are supposedly toting around in our pockets. Believe me, if it were THAT interesting, we’d have written about it by now.
Some of the government/politics and business-oriented blogs don’t so much follow the diary model as they’re written by reporters who know their blog subject intimately. That goes for the sports bloggers, as well. Of course the Advertiser would like to supply readers with more blogs about things they’re interested in. But it seems just from the numbers that what readers want isn’t always what’s most pressing or significant in the grand scheme of things. I’ll admit it — it’s puzzling to me when a post I write about slippers gets 10 times as many comments as one Jerry Burris writes about important rumblings in state government.
Let me follow that by saying that I do not begrudge anyone their blog posts about slippers, as reading about Hawaii politics can get depressing.
I suppose Quarterlife Cafe would probably fall into the category of “meaningless fluff” designed to entice the twenty-something crowd into reading the newspaper. But, hey, if I can get just one more apathetic twenty-something to read just one more article and learn just one more important aspect of some Hawaii issue, then I’ll write all the meaningless fluff I can muster.
For three Saturdays in August, a 6.9-mile route in New York City stretching from lower Manhattan to the Upper East Side will be closed to all cars, trucks and buses from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced yesterday.
The three no-car zone Saturdays, called Summer Streets, are just an experiment, Bloomberg said, according to an article in the NYT today.
Fitness, dance and yoga classes will be held along the route on those days.
What’s the point of this crazy exercise? Well, exercise, for one.
“It’s a new way to use a street, using it more as a park than as a thoroughfare,” said Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group promoting walking, bicycling and mass transit that worked with the city to develop the car-free zone.
“Everyone around the world knows about Park Avenue as one of New York City’s most storied thoroughfares, and to turn that over to pedestrians and cyclists, even though it’s just for three consecutive Saturdays, I think that sends a very powerful message that the tide is turning so that bicyclists and pedestrians are on at least an equal footing with drivers.”
That got me thinking about whether the same initiative could be accomplished here in Hawaii. Whenever there are parades in Waikiki, it causes traffic commotion in my neighborhood. But, quite honestly, it’s kind of nice sometimes to walk up and down Kalakaua Avenue when all the cars and trolleys have been forced to go someplace else and the street is decked out with food booths and music stages.
I’ve become increasingly disturbed by how filled with cars Oahu roads have become, and how clingy drivers are to their vehicles. When did we reach the point where we can’t live without our cars?
A friend from the Mainland visited recently and remarked with surprise that we seemed to encounter traffic regardless of the time of day, regardless of where we were in Honolulu. Of all the things she had imagined about Hawaii, sitting on a hot highway in bumper-to-bumper traffic wasn’t one of them.
Let’s think about this. A 6.9-mile stretch of streets in Honolulu would go, for example, from Aloha Tower Marketplace, along Ala Moana Boulevard, down Kalakaua Avenue, up Diamond Head Avenue and almost reach Kahala Mall. Would it ever work?
I can hear the horns honking in Paradise now … Ah, reminds me of New York!
Dan Nakaso has a great article in the Advertiser today that explores the local angle of slipper-wearing and how wearing them can be detrimental to your health, as stated in a recent report from Auburn University in Alabama. Slippers are a year-round staple here in Hawaii, so there are already tons of comments on that story.
Personally, I know that since blogging about the study, I’ve tried to restrict my slipper-wearing to the beach and have tried to find some shoes that will be better for my feet and legs.
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What’s Kamehameha Day?
I was off yesterday and happily posted a message about celebrating Kamehameha Day on my Facebook page, which led a college friend to comment on my wall:
hmmm… does kamehameha mean something besides what they say before shooting a fireball in dragon ballz?
According to Wikipedia, in addition to being the name of the 18th century era monarch who united the Hawaiian Islands and formally established the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, “Kamehameha” is “a powerful and destructive energy blast, known as the trademark technique of the Dragon Ball franchise.”
Ha. I was never a big Dragon Ball fan, and did not know this. Learn something new every day…
I did a story and 
Robinson also showed Kevin a tool he could use to make his own games, called “Scratch,” and how 3D characters are created in movies and games with a software package called MAYA.
Hawaii state House Rep. Gene Ward’s 
